Boing Boing » mysteryhttp://boingboing.net
Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:44:12 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Serial and the uncomfortable sensation of reality radiohttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/09/serial-and-the-uncomfortable-s.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/09/serial-and-the-uncomfortable-s.html#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2014 13:38:26 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=352279Serial, where Sarah Koenig is presently digging into the 1999 murder of 18 year-old Hae Min Lee, has become a sensation.]]>
This American Life offshoot Serial, where Sarah Koenig is presently digging into the 1999 murder of 18 year-old Hae Min Lee, has become a sensation. Koenig's deep dive into the oddly-patchy evidence and her interviews with key people -- notably Hae's ex boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the crime and is still incarcerated -- has turned a nation of listeners and Redditors into amateur sleuths and jurors.

There is something unsettling about The Guardian's recent series of photographs of the case's key locations: it's their bleakness, their small town-ness. Or maybe it's because they serve as a reminder that what's effectively become "reality radio" for listeners concerns a real-life place, a real victim and family.

The Guardian also interviewed Syed's family on what the apparently wholly-unexpected Serial sensation has meant for them. It's certainly interesting to listen to Koening's methodical study of the case, and my household's definitely hooked. Wouldn't it be amazing if her work leads to the truth about a situation where there arguably weren't enough answers?

Watching the murder become property of public opinion—especially with Syed's brother being told by a Reddit moderator that a key witness and former person of interest in the crime might be participating in the threads—leads to complex feelings.]]>

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/09/serial-and-the-uncomfortable-s.html/feed0Weird gremlin photographed in Chinahttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/27/weird-gremlin-photographed-in.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/27/weird-gremlin-photographed-in.html#commentsFri, 27 Jun 2014 16:09:01 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=314648
What is this mysterious beast photographed by a tourist in the Huairou District valleys in northern Beiking, China?

"Over the weekend I and my friends went to the mountains to take a mini sci-fi film," wrote one online commenter when the photo was first posted.

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What is this mysterious beast photographed by a tourist in the Huairou District valleys in northern Beiking, China?

"Over the weekend I and my friends went to the mountains to take a mini sci-fi film," wrote one online commenter when the photo was first posted. "And when I was having a pee, a person popped up and took pictures of me and shot away."

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/27/weird-gremlin-photographed-in.html/feed0New McSweeney's: Hitchcock v Bradbury!http://boingboing.net/2013/12/18/new-mcsweeneys-hitchcock-v.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/12/18/new-mcsweeneys-hitchcock-v.html#commentsThu, 19 Dec 2013 02:00:25 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=274806
Daniel from McSweeney's writes, "At stake in the latest McSweeney's is nothing less than a celestial duel between Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Bradbury.]]>
Daniel from McSweeney's writes, "At stake in the latest McSweeney's is nothing less than a celestial duel between Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Bradbury. Culled from old anthologies edited by Hitchcock and Bradbury, McSweeney's 45 includes stories by Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl, Josephine W. Johnson, and John Steinbeck, among others. Paired alongside these stories is new work from Brian Evenson, China Mieville, Benjamin Percy, and E. Lily Yu. Also featured is a letter from Boing Boing's own, Cory Doctorow. The result is an unmissable anthology filled with strange, propulsive, and often darkly funny work. "

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/18/new-mcsweeneys-hitchcock-v.html/feed0Mystery of the deep-sea BLOOP solvedhttp://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/mystery-of-the-deep-sea-bloop.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/mystery-of-the-deep-sea-bloop.html#commentsThu, 22 Nov 2012 07:43:51 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=195742
Remember the deep-sea "bloop" noise that some people thought might be coming from a giant squid? Turns out it's an icequake.]]>
Remember the deep-sea "bloop" noise that some people thought might be coming from a giant squid? Turns out it's an icequake. (Here's a WAV of it)

The broad spectrum sounds recorded in the summer of 1997 are consistent with icequakes generated by large icebergs as they crack and fracture. NOAA hydrophones deployed in the Scotia Sea detected numerous icequakes with spectrograms very similar to “Bloop”. The icequakes were used to acoustically track iceberg A53a as it disintegrated near South Georgia Island in early 2008. Icequakes are of sufficient amplitude to be detected on multiple sensors at a range of over 5000 km. Based on the arrival azimuth, the iceberg(s) generating “Bloop” most likely were between Bransfield Straits and the Ross Sea, or possibly at Cape Adare, a well know source of cryogenic signals.

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/mystery-of-the-deep-sea-bloop.html/feed24Missing scientist no longer missinghttp://boingboing.net/2012/06/01/missing-scientist-no-longer-mi.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/01/missing-scientist-no-longer-mi.html#commentsFri, 01 Jun 2012 15:19:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=164152About a month ago, Mike Martin published a profile in Psychology Today, all about Margie Profet, a controversial evolutionary biologist and McArthur fellow who had been missing since 2004.]]>About a month ago, Mike Martin published a profile in Psychology Today, all about Margie Profet, a controversial evolutionary biologist and McArthur fellow who had been missing since 2004. (I posted a link to his story here.)

Now Martin says that Margie Profet has turned up—alive, if not totally physically well. His story led her to realize people were looking for her and to get back in touch with her family.

At the time we lost track of her, Margie was in severe physical pain. Not wanting to trouble anyone else, she did not disclose the fact to us or to her friends, but moved to a new location in which she thought the pain would soon diminish. Instead, it persisted for many years. Unable to work because of it and subsequent injuries, she had long lived in poverty, sustained largely by the religion she had come to early in the decade.

Margie is finally home now, recovering from her long ordeal and hoping to find work in the near future. She is very happy to be reunited with her family, and we are overjoyed to have her back.

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon.

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"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I'll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all? Check out the archive post. I'll update the full list there every morning.

This car sits in the lobby of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. It once belonged to John Lennon, hence the paint job. But that's not the only customization. Inside, apparently, there is a fold-out bed, a portable refrigerator, and a record player. There also used to be a TV. Bear in mind, all these changes were made in the mid-to-late 1960s, when the whole refrigerator-and-TV-in-a-car thing were much more impressive feats of technology.

Sean Rodman works at the Royal BC Museum and sent in this photo, along with a request for assistance. On the roof of the car is a symbol that is, ostensibly, the sign for Libra. Except that it doesn't really resemble the sign for Libra. The Royal BC Museum is confused. Maybe you guys know what this is:

There's no evidence of foul play in the death today of Mexico's Interior Minister José Francisco Blake, but amid the country's raging drug war, there's plenty of suspicion.

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There's no evidence of foul play in the death today of Mexico's Interior Minister José Francisco Blake, but amid the country's raging drug war, there's plenty of suspicion. The helicopter carrying the country's top domestic security official and seven others crashed in the southern part of Mexico City en route to a meeting of prosecutors in nearby Morelos state. The cause of the crash is unknown.

Blake's death is seen as a symbolic blow to the government's military-directed assault on organized crime. 40,000 Mexicans have died in the drug war over the last five years.

The accident occurred almost exactly three years to the day after Mexico’s previous interior minister Juan Camilo Mouriño was killed in the crash of a small plane, also near Mexico City.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/mexico-interior-minister-kill.html/feed10The mystery of the Lower Haight's Peacock Loungehttp://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/the-mystery-of-the-lower-haigh.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/the-mystery-of-the-lower-haigh.html#commentsFri, 11 Nov 2011 18:41:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=128743Rose Garrett over at The Bold Italic did some crackerjack investigative work on a little lounge nestled between the bars in the Lower Haight of San Francisco.]]>Rose Garrett over at The Bold Italic did some crackerjack investigative work on a little lounge nestled between the bars in the Lower Haight of San Francisco. The Peacock Lounge is almost always closed, only very rarely opened for private events. Rose's attempts to reach someone, anyone, associated with the venue go unanswered until its doors serendipitously open again to host a neighborhood meeting:

Nate also shared with me a detail that went a long way toward explaining why Peacock Lounge was such an enigma. He said the space was not, and was never meant to be, a bar or nightlife venue. It was owned and operated by Unity Masonic Hall, located upstairs, and its main use was as a private social hall for the Black Masons.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/the-mystery-of-the-lower-haigh.html/feed4Gulf War Syndrome: A lot of questions, few answershttp://boingboing.net/2011/11/03/gulf-war-syndrome-a-lot-of-que.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/03/gulf-war-syndrome-a-lot-of-que.html#commentsThu, 03 Nov 2011 20:36:01 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=127670Twenty years ago, the United States sent almost 700,000 soldiers to Kuwait and Iraq as part of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.]]>Twenty years ago, the United States sent almost 700,000 soldiers to Kuwait and Iraq as part of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. The war was quick. Bombing began on January 17th and the whole thing was officially over by February 28th. If you started a semester of school just before the first Gulf War began, the conflict would have ended before you even took your midterm exams.

But this short war left a long tail of consequences.

Shortly after the War ended, people who’d served in the Gulf began to turn up in Veterans Hospitals, complaining of a range of symptoms: Fatigue, unexplained pain in their joints and muscles, memory problems and cognitive impairment, malfunctioning digestive systems, and more. There wasn’t a clear pattern—different soldiers reported different clusters of symptoms, some of the people who had symptoms had arrived in the Gulf after the fighting ended, other soldiers had boots on the ground from the beginning but no symptoms. As the years went by, epidemiological studies showed no increase in cancers or other deaths in Gulf War veterans, aside from suicides and accidents. Yet, the symptoms were quite clearly linked to service in the Gulf. The same symptoms occur among other groups of military veterans, but are significantly less common. Today, more than 250,000 U.S. veterans report suffering from one or more unexplained symptoms that have, together, come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome. Scientists are still debating the cause, or even if there is one cause.

In the October 2011 issue of the journal Radiology, Dr. Robert Haley and his colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center published research that identified a nervous system abnormality that exists in some Gulf War Syndrome patients, but not in the healthy veterans who served with them. Haley says it’s evidence that the Syndrome is actually the result of exposure to a miasma of toxins, particularly low doses of sarin nerve gas, extremely high doses of various pesticides, and a drug meant to protect users from the effects of nerve gas.

But, while everybody agrees veterans are suffering, not everyone agrees with Haley’s conclusions, or his evidence. In fact, some big reviews have discounted it completely. There’s a lot we don’t know, but the stakes aren’t just academic. Research on the cause of Gulf War Syndrome affects the funding, benefits, and well-being of the veterans. Ultimately, this Syndrome represents a big, fat example of what happens when the timetables of good science don’t match up with the timetables of individual health needs.

New Pieces

It all began at Khamisiyah. This town in Iraq was the site of a storage center, filled with munitions, including warheads loaded with two different nerve agents, sarin and cyclosarin. In March of 1991, American soldiers blew up the Khamisiyah storage depot, not realizing that there were chemical weapons inside. The diluted chemicals fell on thousands of soldiers who were downwind of the explosion. Nobody was monitoring the air for chemical weapons at the time, and no one reported or was treated for symptoms consistent with nerve gas exposure. But in very low levels, the chemicals were there.

It doesn’t take much sarin or cyclosarin to cause noticeable symptoms. And we know what those symptoms are. As the chemicals attack the central nervous system, victims first get runny noses, watery eyes, and feel a tightness in their chests. As the poisoning progresses, they lose control of bodily functions, twitch and jerk uncontrollably, and finally lose consciousness. That’s all well documented.

But we don’t really know what happens to people exposed to minute amounts of sarin. If the chemical is there, but the dose is so low there’s no symptoms, can it still have an effect on your body years later? That’s where sarin and Gulf War Syndrome cross paths.

Robert Haley thinks he’s found a way to prove that the poison and the illness are more than just passing strangers. His study focused on a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Sarin (and certain pesticides that work through a similar mechanism) attack the enzymes that break down acetylcholine. The rhythym of a burst of acetylcholine, followed by breakdown of acetylcholine, followed by a new burst is what allows information to be sent from one neuron to another. If the breakdown doesn’t happen reliably, the message disappears, like an image on a black and white TV suddenly going all white. Haley hypothesized that soldiers who suffered from symptoms associated with Gulf War Syndrome would also have suffered long-term damage to this system.

To test that, Haley measured blood flow in soldiers’ brains. Anything that inhibits the enzymes that break acetylcholine down should also slow blood flow to certain parts of the brain, including the hippocampus. If previous exposure to sarin had damaged those systems, Haley thought, then the brain might not respond in a normal way when the acetylcholine system was put to the test. He took 57 soldiers from a single battalion, some who had symptoms associated with Gulf War Syndrome and some who didn’t. The soldiers were assigned, at random, to get either an injection of a saline placebo, or an injection of a drug that would inhibit acetylcholine breakdown. Then Haley looked at how the different brains responded.

He saw a clear difference. Both healthy soldiers and those with symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome showed normal blood flow to the hippocampus under normal conditions, and with the saline injection. With the injection of the inhibiting drug, however, the picture changed. The healthy soldiers’ brains responded exactly as expected: Blood flow to the hippocampus slowed, and the people got tired. Some of the sick soldiers, however, had a very different experience. When exposed to the drug, their brains didn’t seem to know how to respond. In some, blood flow to the hippocampus actually increased, in others it decreased far more than was normal, and for some blood flow stayed exactly the same. Haley says this is evidence of damage. Those soldiers’ acetylcholine systems no longer functioned as they should.

Old Puzzle

That seems pretty damning, but Haley’s new study has its faults. While it does mark a replication of results from one of his own earlier studies, Haley’s research has focused exclusively on small sample sizes within a single unit—the 24th Reserve Naval Construction Battalion. When the Khamisiyah storage depot was demolished, that unit wasn’t in a location where they would have been likely to receive even a small dose of the sarin. Haley believes they may still have been exposed to sarin gas from another source, or that the damage is due to exposure to the high levels of pesticides that Gulf War veterans remember applying directly to their clothing and skin.

Haley has also chosen to define Gulf War Syndrome differently than most other researchers. The Centers for Disease Control defines it as, “as the presence, for 6 months or longer, of one or more symptoms from at least two of the following clusters: general fatigue, mood and cognitive abnormalities, and musculoskeletal pain.”

Instead, Haley has used surveys of the 24th Reserve Naval Construction Battalion to split the Syndrome into Syndromes, based on clusters of symptoms. In a 1997 paper, he identified six different syndromes. This new paper focused on three of those: Veterans who reported problems with attention, memory, and reasoning; those who reported far more serious cognitive problems with disorientation, confusion, and balance; and veterans whose symptoms clustered around joint and muscle pain and fatigue.

That makes it difficult to directly compare Haley’s results to those of other scientists. It also muddies the results of his own work. The veterans with confusion and muscular-skeletal symptoms showed damage to their acetylcholine systems, just as I told you before. But the veterans with memory and attention problems didn’t. Their brains seemed to be functioning normally, and it’s hard to say what, if anything, that means.

The confusing part is that results like these doesn’t necessarily tell you much about Gulf War Syndrome. Linda Chao, with the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease and and the department of radiology at the University of California San Francisco, has run a couple of studies looking for neurological differences in a group of more than 400 Gulf War Veterans. She found that neurological damage didn't correlate with people who experienced Haley’s definition of Gulf War Syndrome, nor with people who experienced the Syndrome the way the CDC defines it. But she did find that neurological damage correlated with likely exposure to sarin from Khamisiyah.

In other words, the people with neurological damage were exposed to sarin, and some of them show observable evidence of that damage, but those people aren’t necessarily ones reporting symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome.

Right now, Gulf War Syndrome is like a puzzle with pieces missing. The theory linking it to toxin exposure makes sense in a lot of ways, but doesn’t line up with all the evidence. Studies are often contradictory, seldom replicated by independent researchers, and frequently use small sample sizes. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people are receiving treatment and benefits (or not, as the case may be) based on an incomplete picture. Haley’s new, small study presents some important questions, but doesn’t do much to help clarify the situation.

Instead, if we really want to understand Gulf War Syndrome we need two things: More studies using large sample sizes drawn from a wide swath of Gulf War veterans (something Haley says he’s turning his research towards next), and more attempts to replicate the findings of other researchers. Without that, all we have is a lot of important questions, and no answers.

• Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors and Gulf War Illness — a 2008 research paper by Beatrice Golomb of the University of California San Diego. It looks at epidemiological evidence of whether sarin and pesticides can damage the acetylcholine system in the way Haley has proposed, and what the symptoms of that damage would likely be.

IMAGE: Defense Department photo: Military personnel examine a Scud missile shot down in the desert by an MIM-104 Patriot tactical air defense missile during Operation Desert Storm.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2011/11/03/gulf-war-syndrome-a-lot-of-que.html/feed54Hardcase crime author Max Allan Collins answers the question: "Who do you read?"http://boingboing.net/2011/10/04/hardcase-crime-author-max-allan-collins-answers-the-question-who-do-you-read.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/04/hardcase-crime-author-max-allan-collins-answers-the-question-who-do-you-read.html#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2011 14:05:38 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=120219Road to Perdition. His new Hard Case Crime novel, The Consummata is out today!]]>Road to Perdition. His new Hard Case Crime novel, The Consummata is out today! Here's an essay Collins wrote for Boing Boing, titled, "Who Do You Read?"

WHO DO YOU READ?

By Max Allan Collins

As a published writer, the question I get even more often that the venerable (and stultifying) "Where do you get your ideas?" is the one posed above.

Readers always want to know who you read, for reasons I've never quite figured out. Of course they mean currently publishing writers, and I suspect there's a kind of wish that their personal list will match mine, and everybody will be able to bask in a glow of vindication for sharing such great taste in literature.

But I read almost nobody who's current. I have a few friends whose work I keep up with, and thank God they are very good - among these are Ed Gorman, John Lutz, and Bob Randisi (there are others) - but mostly I avoid everybody else. Occasionally I serve on a committee for the Mystery Writers of America or the Private Eye Writers of America, and plow through a current stack of novels. Now and then some author gets so popular I have to break down and read a book or two to see what the fuss is about. But that's marketing, not entertainment.

There's a basic "busman's holiday" reasoning behind this. If I'm working on a suspense novel all day, why should I relax by reading...a suspense novel? A guy who works at the ice cream shop doesn't go home and say to his significant other, "Let's go out for hot fudge sundaes!" Actually, that's a bad example, because I would probably do exactly that, and plenty of drunks have sought (though rarely kept) jobs as bartenders.

Let's start over. Here's the real reason: all other writers fall into the following categories: worse than me, so why should I put myself through it; as good as me, so why should I bother; and better than me, and, well, screw those guys.

You might rightly ask, can't you learn from these new, superior writers? But another major factor here is that I have a pretty good ear, and have a tendency to mimic. Early in my career, when I was moving from fan to pro, I was still reading a lot of crime fiction. I was working on a book called Blood Money while reading a book by George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. And suddenly all of my dialogue started to sound like George V. Higgins.

Through all these years, there have of course been exceptions - yes, I've read Parker and Coben and even Ellroy, just not everything. And I continued to follow the writers who had influenced me prior to my turning pro. I read every 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain until the end just a few years ago. I kept up with Donald E. Westlake and was giddy when he started writing his Richard Stark "Parker" novels again, which had inspired my Nolan series. And on the rare occasions that Mickey Spillane graced us with a new book, I was first in line.

Perhaps oddly, I love to go to movies by whoever is hot in the mystery field - a Gresham or Lehane or Connelly-derived film, I'm there, man. Can't explain it. Like red hair, it just happens (to steal from Chandler).

And that brings us to the real point. If I'm going to steal from anybody, let it be those I grew up on. I still re-read Dashiell Hammett. No one has written a better tough detective story than The Maltese Falcon, and no one ever will. I love to read Doyle's Holmes stories, which remain as fresh and crisp as, well, Hammett. Chandler is the guy who taught me both first-person and to bring a sense of poetry. From Spillane I learned the value of putting sex and violence and emotion into my prose, and no one ever wrote better action scenes or more noir-ishly evocative description.

I can re-read the best of James M. Cain again and again. Even lesser Cain is worthwhile (I'm proud to have played a role in getting his unpublished novels into print, first with Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press and now - with the forthcoming The Cocktail Waitress - with Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime). I was one of the first to write about Jim Thompson - a monograph that Ed Gorman and I did at the start of the '80s helped spark the Thompson revival. And I can never get enough of Horace McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Not just tough stuff, either. I am a big Agatha Christie fan, Poirot and Marple both. I have been through the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books (novels and novella collections) four or five times. I've read every Perry Mason by Erle Stanley Gardner, and there's a bunch of them.

Stealing from these masters - well, let's call it being influenced - is safe. Because these are the writers who shaped me. There were others in the genre, plenty of them - Ennis Willie, W.R. Burnett, Chester Himes, Ian Fleming, Mike Roscoe, Roy Huggins, Ted Lewis, Richard S. Prather, and many more - and these, too, I revisit. I have mainstream favorites that I re-read, though my favorites are a quirky lot - Calder Willingham, Mark Harris, William March, and my mentor at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Dick Yates. Another teacher at the University of Iowa told me a writer who has never read Proust is worthless, so I have never read Proust, just to spite him. He probably never read Hammett.

So if you're wondering what (or who) I'm reading, if it isn't research for the next Nate Heller novel, it's likely one of my teachers (but not the Proust guy). As for people who started writing professionally after I did, I wish them well - within reason - and hope some of them are influenced by me.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/04/hardcase-crime-author-max-allan-collins-answers-the-question-who-do-you-read.html/feed11Lewis Shiner's new suspense novel DARK TANGOS as a free download; the action-packed, ugly history of Argentinahttp://boingboing.net/2011/09/19/lewis-shiners-new-suspense-novel-dark-tangos-as-a-free-download-the-action-packed-ugly-history-of-argentina.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/09/19/lewis-shiners-new-suspense-novel-dark-tangos-as-a-free-download-the-action-packed-ugly-history-of-argentina.html#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2011 13:17:24 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=118146DARK TANGOS, is now available as a free PDF download from my Fiction Liberation Front website.]]>
Lewis Shiner (one of my favorite writers!) sez, "My latest suspense novel, DARK TANGOS, is now available as a free PDF download from my Fiction Liberation Front website. The starred review from BOOKLIST said, 'Delivers its grim story line with artistic mastery....Short and precise, the novel uses the elegance of tango to radiate sensuality throughout. This is an absorbing and surprisingly action-packed tale based in the ugly truths of Argentina's history.'"